What am I doing wrong?

December 5, 2014

On the eve of this expansion I posted a piece describing my resolve to just have fun with the game, play at my own pace and in my own style, and not worry about what others were doing or let myself get pressured to do things I didn’t want to.

So much for that, it lasted about 10 days give or take. (I am very good about giving advice, but taking it — not so much.) Last night I realized that the familiar anxiety and frustration had returned. This realization dawned on me as I was logging off and making my mental “to do” list for the weekend: madly spam heroics on both my main hunters because neither is properly geared for Highmaul normal. As I have mentioned many times, pugging is a part of the game that I absolutely detest and will go to almost any lengths to avoid. So why would I plan an entire weekend around it? Yup, you guessed it, I am back in my destructive mode of letting others dictate to me their expectations of my game play. They are not to blame for this, mind you, the pressure I feel is completely internally generated.

For some reason I am having a difficult time gearing up to even minimal level this expansion. Well, difficult does not begin to describe it. I am having a HORRIBLE time. I attribute some of this to my spectacular bad luck with drops — for example, I got a grand total of two pieces of upgraded blue quest gear and zero purple upgrades while leveling two hunters. In fact, I have yet to have receive any purple gear as a random upgrade, no matter where it could drop from. This chronic awful luck only serves to ratchet up my frustration when I see guild mates spamming a string of 2 or 3 purples they had drop from a single event, sometimes with a “Woohoo, too bad I already have two of these! lol” to rub a little salt in. Or when I see a guildie complain that his gear is substandard, spam 4-5 heroics, and move from ilvl 610 to 632 in the space of a few hours, then blithely tell everyone how easy it is to gear up, you just have to run a few heroics. Grrrrrr.

I feel like I am doing everything I can to up my gear level — for example, I crafted the one piece I had mats for, and I completed the 680 part of the Legendary quest. I refuse to spend upwards of 50,000 gold to buy one piece of gear, though.

In past expansions I made up for my bad luck with things like currency (valor for example) or by using an appropriate alt to craft adequate gear. A huge part of my frustration with this expansion is that those remedies are no longer realistically available. The one currency route available — apexis crystals — seems decent, but the Legendary ring requirement took up a lot of its usefulness. I am now starting to farm AC in earnest for additional gear. We will see how that goes. But no matter what, it won’t help me much before Sunday, our next scheduled raid time.

Crafted gear — more frustration. I am completely baffled by the miraculous way some people seem to produce massive amounts of the soulbound, daily limited cooldowns required for crafted gear. On my JC hunter I have maxed out whatever work orders were available and not missed a day on my cooldowns. I made one lvl 640 ring for myself and still do not have enough mats to craft the 655 upgrade. Say nothing of the 665 upgrade. Nor will I have enough mats any time soon, given the outrageous Savage Blood requirement and the insane cost of obtaining 15 of them. Despite having a level 3 mine with a follower assigned, and the mining profession, I accumulate the mats to buy Savage Blood at an abysmally slow rate — I have enough now to buy 5 or 6 I think. On my server, Savage Blood go for at least 1500 gold each, if you can find them for that price — usually they are closer to 2500 gold each. Buying them with gold is simply not an option.

Then there is the time. Weeks and weeks to craft and upgrade a single item. Hours and hours to wait in an insane DPS queue for boss drops that are very iffy, even assuming you get a group that does not self destruct one way or another. Add all this to the insane amount of time required just to tend to your garrison on every alt.

Seems like a lot of pain and frustration just to get to the minimum gear level to start raiding. I am beginning to wonder if it is worth it. I am hanging at 628 on one hunter now, but only at 616 on the other. I can probably hit 630 on the one this weekend, but not so sure about the other one. Still, several of my guildies are already pushing or exceeding 640. One is pushing 670. What the hell am I doing wrong?

*sigh* Going to be a long couple of days. Too bad I don’t have the good sense to take the advice I gave myself just before the expansion launched.